Well, someone has! And not just ANY someone. Nope. This someone is Mark Fletcher, the creator of ONElist.

For those of you who don’t get that significance, ONElist is what eventually became the part of the basis for Yahoo Classic Groups. You can read more about Mark and his history here. But my point is that we have someone who was part of the beginnings of the original Yahoo Groups now working on a groups platform that very possibly can be our answer!

So far, both public and private groups are free, and there are some fees for some things like more storage and the ability to add members directly. I haven’t gotten any pricing from Mark, but you can post to him in the Beta group and ask.

Bear in mind, it’s still in Beta testing mode, but that’s more than we ever got when Yahoo hit us with NEO. Some things like photos and database are not yet implemented, but the creator is very open to input and suggestions and is encouraging people to join his Beta Test Group which can be found here.

There is also a TO DO List that Mark has created, that can be located here. Features are the TO DO list and there are bugs and updates also on the site.

Meanwhile, if you want to check out this new Groups platform, test it out, make suggestions, and create your own group to play with, have at it! You can find it here. Or you can join the test group Tyger and I are running, “Feathered Leader’s Nest,” MM Sanctuary.

Then please come back and give us some feedback either here or in Mods And Members, okay?

That new wiggly logo is something an earnest 8-year- old would dream up. But then maybe that is the real audience Yahoo is looking for. I’m unhappy with Yahoo making all the groups line up for an open footlocker inspection and making sure our fingernails are clean and that we have written a letter to Mom.

I actually had put in time, effort and design skills into my original front page for my group. Then all hell broke loose over a Saturday that Marissa spent with an intern and decided to make everything “UNIFORM” and then sat in the break room and redesigned the logo, after having rejected a months worth of submissions from actual Designers/Yahoo users!

I really am in awe of the amount of work that has gone on to put this blog up and all the information it contains.

Here is our story…. it may differ somewhat from others. We are scripters and stationery makers. That is to say the groups I am involved are to do with HTML/ VBScript to animate e-mails. There is also a Yahoo group for learning Vector Markup Language to add to our scripts. There are those that simply fill in the scripts with their own graphics and music or there are those like myself that actually write the scripts.

We were quite happy until very recently when our mail suddenly arrived back to us on the bounce in pieces. Yahoo had, out of the blue, switched us from traditional or classic to fully featured. We found out how a blank mail with the name of the group in the address would be answered by Yahoo and the traditional status returned.

BUT no sooner had that problem been solved than all our creative work came back with an egp html banner. That involves a load of Yahoo text either at the top or at the bottom of our mail. and defacing stripes across it. It is like graffiti on top of our work.

We have some canny scripters among us that can find a way of hiding it, but as yet no code to actually filter it out. Kill it. And we were such happy creators, mostly stay-at-homes, some with a health issue, some Senior Citizens. It was their outlet.

This is what one of mine looks like on the rebound from Yahoo. And Yes… some of us do still use XP with Outlook Express. Some use WLM or WM in Win7.

To give you some idea… The center shape rotates as do the 4 ovals. The background scrolls left to right and the text message becomes visible over the center image then fades away in this example.

But whatever is used it should NOT be sent back from the group “bounce” in this condition.

Scripters do put a credit section in their scripts and this is mine for this script:

Sadly so far I am not that clever a scripter to understand the extra attachment coding in the Cascading Style Sheet or the code in the VBScript to see how it is triggered. So to date we cannot delete it, block it or eliminate it as once the inclusion of a visiting card did. Thus I continue a search of those with more advanced coding know-how.

A few scripters may revise all their scripts, some may just write new ones to hide it, but it is still there underneath or pushed down out of sight….thus defeating the object of the exercise as far as Yahoo are concerned. Their banner is thus not visible.

It would help us all if Yahoo knew what effect it has on our creative aspirations and actually felt some sympathy towards us. Because it certainly does not enhance what we do or add to our “enjoyment of the NEO experience.”

Note: This was written by a concerned owner who gave permission for it to be shared.

Hi, Everyone,

I’ve been a follower of this blog for some time. I struggled with whether or not to write this post, but I finally feel I should. I’m writing today because there is an issue that needs everyone’s attention: Posts Getting Truncated in the Archives.

I’m an owner of a small role-playing group that is basically a writing group, and ever since Neo appeared, posts in the archives have been truncated at 64kb. Now, I’ll be honest, when Neo first appeared I didn’t like it, but I could deal with it, assuming they put the archives table back, which they did. I could deal with it mostly because now that Yahoo Groups has the same software as Google Drive, when another member and I post writings from our Google Drive accounts, the posts aren’t filled with a bunch of symbols and characters make them hard to read, especially posts in the archives. This was a huge improvement after years of dealing with this problem.

However, little did I know. Some months later I was archive-diving, checking my facts for something I was writing (something I do at least once a month, if not more) and I came across this post from 2011 that said “Message over 64KB, truncated.” I thought, what the hell is that? Why? Because I’ve looked at this particular post before in the archives, and I was also the sender. If any post got truncated in 2011 when I was the sender, I would have resent it in parts. I always check and make sure my posts come through alright since Groups is known for sometimes eating posts or not sending the entire thing through or any number of other things. This post was not truncated in 2011, so why is it now? Because of Neo; that’s why.

I can deal with a lot. I even stayed silent when I found ads overtaking a post in the archives, making it impossible to read, because I knew Yahoo would probably get around to fixing it. But this? Truncating my group’s members’ work and mine? All bets are off. I started e-mailing Brenda; I started directing people to the issue on the Feedback Forum — everything I could think of. Except Yahoo closed the issue with this BS about it being fixed, when they didn’t even address the right issue when they closed it.

I thought, okay, what crap, but there are still two topics open about this problem. I’ll just work with those now, and they were getting up in votes, too, but then Yahoo deleted those. Yep, the dreaded problem you guys have talked about here. It forced someone to repost the issue. And now that topic is ranked 52.

Some of you might be wondering why I didn’t catch this problem sooner, especially as I was saying Neo wasn’t that bad. Well, because a lot of my group’s postings don’t go over said limit. Only a small portion are ever that long, so even if I archived constantly, I obviously never came across a posting that had that note at the bottom of it sooner. I’m saddened I didn’t because I would have been bitching sooner, but I’m not the only one with this problem. If you go on Yahoo Answers, a lot of the people complaining are people with writing groups. And even worse? The problems are with postings from years ago. Of course it happens now, too, so I have to go through every post we send now and make sure the writing doesn’t get cut off; it is extra work for me, but I can deal with it. What I find really hard to swallow, however, is posts from years ago now being truncated. Yahoo would say two things:

To just have the sender resend it. My group is coming upon its 11th year. The likelihood of any one member still having a post from, say, 2005 in their inboxes is remote.

(and the one that REALLY gets me) The limit is 15MB, so this shouldn’t be happening. It is happening, gosh darnit!

In short, this is a huge problem. It makes the archives useless. It is unacceptable. And it hurts, as a writer. So I ask for your help for my group and for every other one that is having this problem: If you have come across this issue in your own group, can you please vote and/or comment on the one topic that is still open about this issue on the Forums? I am not the author, but I agree wholeheartedly. This needs to be fixed. It is wrong on so many levels, and I am tired of Yahoo pretending it is fixed or easily remedied. Neither is true.

You can comment on the closed one; it does have the most comments. Despite the fact that it’s supposed to be closed to voting, I see today that it’s gone up from 16 to 11 rank-wise. I don’t understand that at all, but here is the link for that.

Yahoo NEO has destroyed our databases. Students are no longer able to use the database to post……anything.

Yahoo NEO violates the privacy of users that post directly to the group by showing the IP address of the user. Our network is fortunate to use a server to bypass this security problem.

Yahoo NEO does not allow aliases to be used.

Yahoo NEO is in violation of the ADA and other nations’ rights of the disabled. How dare you treat these people with contempt. How dare you treat these people as yesterday’s garbage. How dare you roll out this format without any type of notice. We owe it to our neighbors to fight you at every opportunity and to bring you to justice.

We have every right to hold your advertisers accountable for blocking access to the groups with ads you place on the message board that stops the equipment they use.

Yahoo NEO discriminates against the elderly and poor. The elderly on fixed incomes cannot afford the computer upgrades needed to navigate your new format that is a RAM hog.

You dismissed the hundreds of thousands of complaints against NEO. You have been disingenuous to the media and concerned individuals by saying the classic system was outdated. You had every opportunity to build a new foundation with the classic groups. The dollars you’ve spent with just the new logo could have been used to enhance the classic groups.

We will not reveal our final strategy. We will say that a growing number of concerned individuals are aware of what you have done.

This format is in violation of public website access defined in the DOJ/ADA. Yahoo was warned from day one that the format is illegal but has not heeded the concerns of the visually impaired.

This format is in violation of international conventions adopted by the majority of sovereign nations through the auspices of the United Nations. Rights to public access to to internet websites for the elderly and disabled. The placement of ads causes the reading equipment of the blind to stop functioning.

This format is discriminatory against the elderly.The elderly have warned Yahoo since day one that the format causes their older computers and slow modems to freeze. The high usage of RAM depletes the functionality of their computers over a period of time.

This format cannot be used by those that have peripheral vision and nerve damage. Once again, users have voiced and written their concerns to Yahoo. These concerns have been dismissed. Yahoo claims that measures have been taken to address these concerns. Their proclamations are not based in reality. Their proclamations are for the sole attention of media scrutiny.

Yahoo needs to be held accountable for forcing this unwanted, unneeded, and unpopular format on millions of users that have complained about this format from day one.

This article is a follow-up to a previous article written in the hopes of highlighting the problems caused by Yahoo with its hasty decision to NEO-fy its membership. In February, I wrote an article about how Yahoo’s awful decision to inflict its NEO model on its users affected one business community, namely the members of the QFLEA small business community.

This community consists of small business people who run their businesses on websites and list those businesses at QFLEA.com. A major component of our shared experience is the QFLEA Yahoo Group, where said businesses have the opportunity to exchange information and ideas that are beneficial to all.

We’ve run this Yahoo Group since 1999 and have shared over 20,000 posts related specifically to small business. These posts have educated members about a variety of issues from business shopping carts to website HTML coding to search engine optimization to effective use of social media and much more. The one thing that we have not allowed in this group is advertising. We made a decision early in the process that the one thing that might kill this Yahoo Group was if we all started spamming each other, so the 20,000 messages in this group have been related only to business and topics that would assist our members.

That ended with NEO. While hundreds of members have been able to refrain from spamming the Yahoo Group for almost fifteen years, Yahoo has decided to spam us on their own. Intertwined within the educational and informational posts of our membership is spam from AdChoices. For example, in between my post about QFLEA and social media this morning and a member post about how to handle a particular line of text/javascript, there is spam from Yahoo about there being no long-term benefits from Glucosamine. Between a question about websites and mobile phones and commentary about a business editorial, we have spam about the top credit cards for 2014 for excellent credit.

Have the powers-that-be at Yahoo lost their minds? Is it not bad enough that you’ve spammed our group with big picture ads? (By the way, my favorite is the ad for the builder of the community in whose house I already live!!) Must you muddy up a purely information process with advertising as well? Your spam ads are unwelcome and detract from the efficiency of our Yahoo Group, though having said that, I know it means nothing to you. I just find it particularly annoying that in addition to giving us a platform which is buggy, user-unfriendly, troublesome to edit, and a major step backwards in terms of usefulness, you’ve added spamming into our content.

It would appear that NEO is, if nothing else, aptly named. It stands for what must be your new mantra, Never-ending Economic Opportunities! In layman’s terms, Yahoo is now spamming all that is spammable! Unfortunately, at the rate they are proceding, there will be fewer and fewer members on which to foist future failures.